is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016).
THE KEY DIFFERENCE that I observe when visiting a thriving city and a striving one is in the manifest gap in ambition and maintenance between private places and...
THE THEME FOR June 2024 is non-government organisations—NGOs. This allows for the publisher of this monthly, i.e. Penang Institute itself, to do some soul-searc...
IF YOU WISH to enhance material production, be this of electronic chips, fish and chips, or arts and crafts, the contemporary wisdom today is to aim for the est...
I REMEMBER STRUGGLING with the terms “weather” and “climate” in primary school.And as with most related words, it was about knowing when to use one and not the...
WHETHER WE LIKE to think so or not, modern political thought gained effective sloganic expression during the French Revolution (in 1789), incidentally around th...
SPACE: The final frontier… Good slogan. Classic. Melodramatic, evocative. And totally anthropocentric; to be sure, Space is after all 100% of the Universe, minu...
SINCE THE THEME for January 2024 is Penang’s Economic Development, it seems appropriate that I present in somewhat truncated form the document produced in March...
YOU HAVE YOUR favourite places to be in. Favourite rooms within whose walls you feel safe, where you feel at home. There, you relax. The knot in your stomach lo...
PENANG INSTITUTE is in the process of launching its Forum for Leadership And Governance (FLAG) Project. The venue for its series of initiatives will be the newl...